Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Rethinking the selfare state 142
2.77 percent) attended private schools 15 —a rate of about one-half of that in the United
States. 16 By way of comparison, in the mid-1980s in the United Kingdom, slightly more
than 6 percent of school children attended private schools—also a very minor
proportion. 17
While public schools do not, strictly speaking, have a monopoly on education, it is
safe to say that they possess significant market power. If parents desire to send their
children to a private school they typically must pay tuition in after-tax dollars for their
children directly, with the parent and the school receiving little or no public financial
support. In practice the funding of private schools varies dramatically from jurisdiction to
jurisdiction. Manitoba is the most generous province in Canada in this regard, providing
private schools with approximately 80 percent of the public school expenditure per
pupil. 18 Provinces that provide moderate funding are British Columbia, Quebec and
Alberta, which provide as much as 60 percent of the per-pupil public funding to private
schools. 19 The remaining provinces pursue policies that provide no direct support for
independent schools, aligning them closely with the policies that predominate in the
United States. At the same time, parents of private school pupils indirectly support the
public education system through various taxes, the foremost being property and income
taxes. In the absence of strong incentives to remove their children from the public system,
such as strong religious beliefs or deeply-rooted concerns with the quality of education
publicly available, it is not surprising that parents ordinarily send their children to local
public elementary and secondary schools. 20
Government-owned and operated schools
Despite the dominance of government-provided schools in a number of different
countries, this mode of government intervention is not uncontroversial, and many parents
(as well as academic commentators) have expressed criticism with the performance of
government-run schools, particularly when parents face a dichotomous choice between
securing the benefits of state support through attendance of children in public schools or
foregoing this benefit entirely by opting for a private school requiring tuition financed out
of after-tax income. The criticisms expressed against government delivery can be arrayed
in six basic areas, the first two of which concern the content of the education received by
individual students, the other four problems relating to the design of the educational
delivery system itself. In arraying these criticisms, we wish to emphasize that the overarching
criticism is not one regarding the merits of government intervention in relation to
basic education, but rather concern over the precise modality of intervention, and the
belief that demonstrable improvements to the system of primary and secondary education
could be realized were there greater scope for parental choice in how and where public
subsidies were expended. In other words, our discussion is predicated on the view that
despite some of the performance failures that have come to be associated with
government provision of education, one should not overlook the remarkable contributions
that publicly supplied education has historically made in supporting a broad array of
public goals.